Re: VIDEO: Simplifying Plone with tiles and shortcodes

Hi,

Not to discredit the argument that default pages will cause confusion based on the user experience we all have had while working on support cases, but you will hear about the problems people have, never about the things they succeeded at (or how many times they succeeded), neither about the problems users don't realise they have had or problems that are too complex to easily grasp and describe to contact support about. To use this as a metric is at least prone to several biases. 

I've done my share of end user and web master training and a standard subject is explanation of the default page. It's not ideal since it requires explanation, especially back in the days when we didn't have the big 'You are now editing the default view of a folder, if you want to edit the folder" warnings. But it's still a stop gap: the issue I have with default pages is that they only become visible to the editor when the harm has already been done. Only after they click edit or go to the sharing tab they see a warning. We want to stick to "the hierarchy is the navigation" and "where you are is what you get": default pages are the sneak exception to the rule.

I'm not a UI expert, but if we could provide editors with more context and provide a default info pane in a portlet, the edit bar or float alongside the edit bar in Plone 5's plone.app.toolbar concept that signals a "You're on a default page for a folder now" but probably also other useful information, it could stop most novice editors from getting lost. Out of sight, out of mind. 

We had a customer that insisted on a complex intranet/extranet workflow where also the images had to have workflow because of the sensitivity of report info being leaked before going public. This resulted in pages being (internally) published where the images were still private, causing all kinds of issues. Our solution was not to change the workflow or provide some kind of auto-publishing: We only added a portlet that scanned through all related items and images on the context and listed those along with their workflow state color coded.
For editors it was now a clear enough cue, a red line in that portlet that was always visible was enough to avoid publishng documents with private images. 

You see the same UI concept in many newer desktop/tablet applications: the 'always on' status/info pane that changes it's contents based on what a user is doing and shows useful info based on the context/task at hand. The challenge will be not to flood such an info pane with info to remedy every problem we encounter, but that's another story :-)

With kind regards,

Fred van Dijk
--
Zest - www.zestsoftware.nl
Westewagenstraat 60-v6
3011 AT Rotterdam
Tel: +31 (0)10 2959251




Op 21 mrt. 2014, om 03:18 heeft Dylan Jay <djay-n0pU0XVUApFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> het volgende geschreven:

> On 21 Mar 2014, at 10:03 am, Héctor Velarde <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> I have to say that I dislike this a lot.
>> 
>> so, to get rid of the "folder problem" we are going to break the metaphors behind all of the other content types?
> 
> well less breaking than replacing with something better. And also its less of a change than deco proposed so should be easier to deal with.
> 
> 
>> 
>> can anybody explain me how can a page contain a page? or how can an image contain an image? how do I explain that to a normal user?
> 
> If when you train news users, they find the default page concept and folder intuitive, that would be useful information to know.
> My experience has been different however. We deal with a lot of non technical users and I both train and deal with support calls first hand. I literally had customers ask me "how do I add a page under this page". The number of times users have forgotten display and default pages work and accidentally "broken" an important landing page via the display menu I can't count. The UX hitlist was a method to try and judge what were the issues that most affected users and issues with default pages clearly came out on top for editors (see https://trello.com/b/h8J1evdp/the-plone-ux-hit-list-beta).
> So I hope we can at least agree that what we have now isn't great, regardless if it works well for us expert users.
> 
> So the question is how we fix this? and I believe it will require some change of metaphors.
> 
> What seems popular with other cms is to seperate out the concepts or urls, menus and content completely. You create content, and then sometime late add it into a menu. Many users now seem used to this idea and describe things in that way, ie "how do I add this content into the drop down menu here?". I don;t think this a good way to go.
> 
> Replacing folders with pages doesn't seem a great leap and I think the it is easy to understand. The users are thinking in terms of content, not folders. 
> No one is suggesting an image should contain and image, or a file contain a file.
> I'm also not proposing that all images go into a media folder as martin mentioned. I think that is also a bad idea.
> 
>> 
>> if the default view of a folder is difficult to understand (I doubt that), imagine explaining a "tile" to a normal user...
> 
> What about a tile hard to understand? or a better word perhaps is what limi originally used which is "widget". Programs like Word allow inserting rich content like spreadsheets or videos into a document. You can insert table of contents into a document. You are inserting something dynamic or extra into a page. We probably don't even need to use the word tile or widget, just "insert". Seems a very well used metaphor to me. Of course we will have to test this with real users.
> 
>> not to mention that ugly and easy-to-break code inside the TinyMCE editor.
> 
> This has been discussed in this thread already and having the shortcode in a editor itself has both it's pros and cons. When I get time I'll look at ways to not have the code in the editor and I welcome any help in that regard as I'm not the worlds best javascript programmer and running a business doesn't give me a lot free time to write code.
> 
>> 
>> sorry, Dylan, but in my view this is a recipe for a complete disaster.
>> 
>> this has nothing to do with enhancing the editing experience in Plone.
>> 
>> we are solving the wrong problems and we are lending bad concepts of others CMS to Plone.
> 
> I'd welcome more opinions on what the right problems are, and what you think better alternatives are to solve the problem of default pages. Especially if this was based on discussions with new Plone users. My impression is that you would be in the minority if you think default pages and folders aren't a problem. 
> I am very motivated to push plone forward to improve it's UI. This is the reason I agreed to lead the UI team. Plone used to lead in terms of UI and I think we can do that again. 
> I urge anyone with strong opinions on Plone's UI to try as much as they can to talk to real users and try and incorporate their feedback. As a developer led community we are perhaps in danger of building something for experts like us, not beginners and thus shrinking rather than growing our community.
> 
>> 
>> Héctor Velarde
>> 
>> 
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Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book
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applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field,
this first edition is now available. Download your free book today!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech